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Better When He's Bad (2014)

by Jay Crownover(Favorite Author)

4.1 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0062351893 (ISBN13: 9780062351890)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

William Morrow

series

Welcome to the Point

review 1: Shane Baxter, isn't just a bad boy - he's one of the baddest and has just gotten out of prison after serving a five year sentence and now that he's out he's got a few things on his mind. The first of course is every man's desire after being locked up for so long is to have sex, the second is to find his mate Race and last but not least - kill Novak -the main guy behind the reason he landed in jail. However, things have changed on the outside while Shane has been gone and his friend Race is nowhere to be seen. Race was on the fast-track to a Ivy League school and a ticket out of this no-good place but turns out other things more important than school and a ticket out turned up when Race discovered he had a younger half-sister called Dovie. We read as Race has disappeared an... mored everyone wants a piece of him and more importantly his sister is worried and of course we all know how 'real' bad guys are - they will kill and torture anyone in their way and right now the only connection to Race is Dovie. This novel follows the relationship between Baxter and Dovie and soon we realise she is the only one he lets call him "Shane" as when it's just the two of them , she gets the gentle , sensitive and nice guy hiding underneath all that bad facade. This was definitely a harder read than most and does focus on what I can imagine is the lowlife and hard-up type of life with drugs, gangsters and dropkick parents who are more interested in their next fix, than their children. If you are a fan of books and characters like "Twitch" , then check out Better When He's Bad by Jay Crownover as you will be adding Shane Baxter to your Book Boyfriend List.
review 2: The story was 4-stars, but delivery of the story was 2-stars through a lot of the book, thus the reason for the overall rating of 3-stars. I mean, let's call a spade a spade...oh, right, the author did...over and over and over and over. I did NOT need to hear that Bax was bad in such mass quantity. Not only did HE think it, but so did Dovie. Not only did they think it, but they said it repeatedly! I think at least a third of the book could have been removed because it was redundant thoughts about Bax being bad. Not only do we hear about Bax's disposition repeatedly, but we hear about how good and viriginal and untouched Dovie is. Oh, and if a reader has forgotten what eye color either main character had, wait a paragraph or two and you have your answer. Sigh. And it was only the author telling us Bax was bad, why not SHOW us. Make the character do something bad, a flashback showing us the bad stuff he did, something! Yes, there are a couple things he does that make him a punk, but other characters in other books have done similar things, it wasn't anything too bad. That leads me to another issue, while I really liked the story, by the end, there were some rather glaring issues that bothered me. Bax seemed to do the right thing or seem rather thoughtful for someone so damn bad. Not only that, but I got the impression he did not finish high school and was this super bad dude, so his rather expansive vocabulary in his thoughts and what he said aloud at times made no sense. The guys I knew in high school who thought they were bad never would have said things like Bax did. Another perplexing item was that Bax was 18 when went to jail, spent 5-years there (how much time spent in jail was stated too much as well), I find it incredibly difficult to believe Bax created so much chaos and instilled so much fear in people by the age of 18 let alone to have it still hold weight 5-years later. Yes, it made a bit more sense at the end of the book why he may have had people so frightened of him, but it was not because Bax himself was bad after all. We also had a point in the book where Dovie had to spell some things out about our mystery. Really? Bax had been more than capable of connecting the dots on so much before then, to have him be so completely blind to the truth was a bit much to swallow. Then there was the matter of our H driving a very conspicuous car and no one could find Bax and Dovie? Just going to the edge of the Point and they were invisible, I guess? And this Novak character, nor anyone else, had a clue about this house Bax had purchased? Yet they could find out Dovie's cell number or other random info? I call BS, but had no choice but to go along with it. Even though the first 15% was really rough to get through, for me, and from 15%-50% was better, I didn't finally started liking it until that halfway mark. The 'Bax is bad' was just too thick at the beginning and I struggled, I thought I might DNF even. I pushed through and really started to enjoy the characters and the story when they were allowed to show us the story and telling us more than Bax was bad and Dovie was good. It really started getting good around 50%, and that is a long way to go into a book before a reader really starts enjoying a book, IMO. I was able to figure out a lot of the plot until the end, then there were surprises I enjoyed even if I felt the twists were kind of thrown out there and explained rather quickly, especially in light of the 'Bax is bad' narrative we got throughout the story. I have liked most of the Marked Men books, I loved Rule's story the most even though the copy I had originally purchased was absolutely riddled with errors and was difficult to read because of them. While the stories this author tells are really good and I love the characters, I still think there are execution issues that are perplexing given that there is a publisher behind the books now. There may not be the errors in grammar, but why wouldn't an editor tell an author to cut back on the repetitive descriptions of our character's character?!PS...there were some rather disgusting intimate scenes (one after a gory fight where lots of blood was flowing from Bax and the other fighter) with no description of cleaning up. The fact that there is BLOOD on Bax from him and another fighter and Bax and Dovie have some intimacy at that point was gross. It was all I could think about while reading it. Then later, as always, we get to a point where condoms are no longer used, but it was done without telling the reader in some way that Mr HasSexWithHookersandStrippersOftenandHasSpentTimeinJail was clean. These are things some of us notice and would prefer were addressed. less

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